How the technology works

As far as BCIs go, the technology has been slow to garner widespread use.

It sometimes is called an “” because it is expensive, cumbersome, and currently with limited applications.

So far, the technology has largely has been relegated to small spheres of medical usage — namely as a possibility to help severely paralyzed individuals or those with certain severe neurological conditions like Parkinson's disease.

As the name suggests, a BCI is often directly hooked up to the brain, requiring an implant in the skull for it to work.

“There's obviously significant medical risk to having a physical device permanently implanted in your brain,” Dr. Henry Mahncke, a neuroscientist and chief executive officer of Posit Science, told Healthline. “It's a surgical procedure to put the device in, and a chronic physical risk to the brain to have a foreign object embedded in it.”

Facebook is hoping to change that, though.

They are working on a noninvasive BCI that would utilize brainwaves but without having to be physically embedded within the skull.

Instead, the unit could potentially be worn as cap.

The speed of the transfer of information between the brain and the BCI through the skull is of utmost importance to create a viable piece of medical equipment.

“There is a tremendous loss of accuracy,” when measuring brain activity outside of the skull compared with using an embedded BCi, says Mahncke.